Managing our above ground pool this summer and small hot tub in winter and continually asking "why isn't this easier" led to the development of Pool Pilot. Scan a test strip with your camera, water care recommendation checklist generates and you can order more supplies if needed easily from Amazon. Basically met my personal need and hoping it will help others too.
The fun technical bit: test strip chart colors can vary by manufacturer and even between production batches, but, the specific color chart that comes on a bottle should be accurate to those specific steps. Additionally, test strip colors are notoriously hard to match from photos. RGB comparison falls apart with lighting changes. After many interesting and considerations we calibrate of the specific test strip bottle and we use LAB color space and Anthropic's Claude vision model to read strips directly. This has worked exceptionally well in our testing and works with any brand;
The app also offers timers, history and much more. It has become a minor obsession.
React Native/Expo, Firebase backend, $10/year after 3 free tests (early tier pricing). Would love feedback from any fellow pool or hot tub owners.
I've taken certification exams where an app is run on my machine verifying I have nothing else open and my camera had to be enabled, with me and my hands in view for the entirety of the test. There are ways to ensure cheating is more difficult than it's worth, however I see this tech as greatly changing what we want to learn and how we might learn it. It is transformative and not slowing down.
Managing our above ground pool this summer and small hot tub in winter and continually asking "why isn't this easier" led to the development of Pool Pilot. Scan a test strip with your camera, water care recommendation checklist generates and you can order more supplies if needed easily from Amazon. Basically met my personal need and hoping it will help others too.
The fun technical bit: test strip chart colors can vary by manufacturer and even between production batches, but, the specific color chart that comes on a bottle should be accurate to those specific steps. Additionally, test strip colors are notoriously hard to match from photos. RGB comparison falls apart with lighting changes. After many interesting and considerations we calibrate of the specific test strip bottle and we use LAB color space and Anthropic's Claude vision model to read strips directly. This has worked exceptionally well in our testing and works with any brand;
The app also offers timers, history and much more. It has become a minor obsession.
React Native/Expo, Firebase backend, $10/year after 3 free tests (early tier pricing). Would love feedback from any fellow pool or hot tub owners.